07-18-2017, 05:54 PM
(07-13-2017, 12:58 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: College does broaden the mind, and can encourage thought beyond the boxes people are brought up in. On the other hand, it does tend to promote some boxes for your mind. In my day, I could avoid them, but I don't know about today.
The tough-to-escape box is of student loan debt. It can induce people to sell out their dreams. The second is the absence of good career tracks for people with less than a degree. Underemployment for someone with a college degree may mean that one does the sort of work that high-school dropouts used to do. Fewer people drop out of high school, but the work is still ill-paid, the management of people doing such work is still harsh, and the work offers no economic security.
Quote:The first one is concentrating on the economic benefits and job training; this "education" just builds a big box around you and confines your view to the priority of making money. Making money for what purpose? And whom do you serve, and whom do you turn your productive life over to in the process? At what cost to society? And in your economics priority, do you absorb the box of trickle-down economics and libertarian beliefs that enslave us to the wealthy?
The original objective of college education was to make students better. The college student would get to learn things that the common man didn't get to know, like the principles underlying the social order. The common man got fear, either of brutal treatment for any rebellion, hunger for slacking off, or eternal damnation for any disobedience to the Master Class that he somehow gets away with in This World. Where there are no rewards, the system depends upon fear as its sole enforcer. So it was in a Gulag, a KZ-Lager, or almost anywhere for a peasant in the Middle Ages.
To be sure, the philosophy and theology ratified the hierarchy, repression, and inequity of the social order, but as part of the educated elite, like the abbot in charge of the illiterate monks, the bishop over the semi-literate parish priests, the tax-collector, the legal officer, or the more professional sort of military officer, one had relative privilege.
Quote:The second box is the materialist empirical paradigm. It still tends to dominate college, despite cracks in the box that developed in the Awakening years. Some of those cracks can still be seen in some places. Science gives us many benefits and dispells lots of errors. When it's not a box, it enables us to know much of what works and what doesn't. But I wonder if those who prefer evangelical superstitions and establishment/fundamentalist religions see a grain of truth in the back of their minds, beyond the reach of the usual authoritarian and intolerant preaching they listen to; the need for a spiritual life. It does greatly cramp humanity to restrict it to the materialist box, and thus deny your very own consciousness and center of your being and creativity. Reducing human life to what can be explained through mechanical causes, is about the worst box you can crawl into, because it cuts you off from genuine life itself, and from the benefits of spiritual knowledge and genuine worship, consciousness-revealing arts, prayer and meditation. Being present, not dominated by mental chatter and other addictions, and aware of the miracle, mystery and glory of "God" both within our consciousness and body, and among us humans and all things, is both essential, wondrous, and sadly lacking in our society.
Spirituality has no cash value in commerce. But we have seen plenty of examples of people operating without ethical values; as with Enron about fifteen years ago and with many financial institutions... acting without integrity can lead to incredible disasters. Treating people like livestock at best and vermin at worst is not good for bringing out the best in people.
Quote:I tend to think that seeing humans and other beings as inherently valuable in their own right, because they are soul and spirit and not just objects to manipulate, are essential to a fulfilling life and society. The two boxes above then don't need to be torn down, just seen beyond.
I am tempted to believe that the ideal way to create prospective managers, engineers, programmers, etc., would be to establish academies analogous to the Service academies. How good your college board scores and your work behavior would largely determine what academy one gets to attend. Obviously. "IBM Academy" would be more desirable than "(insert store name) Academy". I can see the obvious merits of an honor code... and the rigidity that it implies.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.